Sooner or later, preferring ideology to practicality in electricity generation is going to cause trouble. But are leaders aware of the issues, or in Scotland’s case do they just assume the rest of the UK will bale them out in an emergency?
H/T The GWPF

Scotland faces being plunged into darkness for days says The Herald Scotland, possibly resulting in deaths and widespread civil disobedience, due to the country’s over-reliance on green energy, a new report has warned.

A massive gap in the electricity system caused by the closure of coal-fired power stations and growth of unpredictable renewable generation has created the real prospect of complete power failure.

It is now the tenth anniversary of what, by any account, is by far the most expensive piece of legislation ever enacted by the UK Parliament.

Dellers celebrates in style:

If you want to loathe and despise the political class even more than you do already, I heartily recommend a read of the damning report that Rupert Darwall has compiled for the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Keep a bottle of whisky and your service revolver handy for when you’re done.

Unlike, say, the Paris Climate Accord — all of whose carbon emissions targets are entirely voluntary — the CCA imposes on Britain a legally binding commitment to ensure that its CO2 emissions in 2050 are at least 80 per cent lower than in 1990. (Originally the target was just 60 per…

The United Nation’s environment chief has resigned after being accused of ‘obscene CO2 hypocrisy’ for the expenses he claimed while flying around the world to give lectures on climate change.

Erik Solheim has stepped down from his role after an internal audit revealed that he had spent £390,000 on flights and hotel stays in just 22 months and had spent 80% of his time away from his base in Nairobi.

It is believed that Solheim was asked to resign by the UN secretary general, António Guterres and a UN staff union leader branded some of his expenses as ‘mind-blowing’.

Countries like the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden were so incensed at Solheim’s attitude that they were withholding tens of millions of dollars in funding to the UNEP, the UN’s environment programme, threatening a financial crisis.

The media’s climate change coverage is even worse than we thought. If told aliens were running round the Arctic zapping icebergs with lasers, many of them would be keen to believe it – or at least that’s the impression often given.

A week ago, we were told that climate change was worse than we thought. But the underlying science contains a major error, reports The GWPF.

Independent climate scientist Nicholas Lewis has uncovered a major error in a recent scientific paper that was given blanket coverage in the English-speaking media.

Spending fortunes, having little of any benefit to show for it, and not being in control of what’s going on. That seems to be the verdict from the auditors on their government. The sums involved are eye-watering.

Germany’s Federal Audit Office has accused the government of a catastrophic mis-management of the green energy transition (Energiewende), reports The GWPF.

The wastage of resources is “unprecedented”. Germany’s Federal Audit Office has accused the federal government of having largely failed to manage the transformation of Germany’s energy systems.

I am proud to be the Canadian representative for the climate exit (CLEXIT) movement. Canada has more culpability than any other nation in creating and perpetuating the deception. It is not hyperbole to say that Canada was central to creating and mobilizing the false claim of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). The idea that humans were causing runaway global warming originated with the Club of Rome. Formed in 1968 by David Rockefeller, it expanded on the Malthusian idea that the population would outgrow the food supply. The expansion was that world population would outgrow all resources. They made three major assumptions.

The demand for resources would increase every year because the population is increasing every year.

Developed nations increase the demand by using resources at a much greater rate than developing nations.

More nations are changing from developing to developed and accelerating demand.

They produced a few books and reports to substantiate the claims about population and demand. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb garnered enormous attention. Less well read but still influential was the 1972 book Limits to Growth by Meadows et al. It used a very primitive computer program that started with two components. The known volume of a resource and the current rate of use. Then, using a simple linear trend, it projected the point at which the resource would run out. It also projected the point at which the volume of the resource use peaked. Another book published in 1977, Ecoscience, Population, Resources, and Environment, influenced policy for a long time because of Paul Ehrlich’s co-author John Holdren. He later became Science Advisor in the Obama White House.

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Maybe the Canadian coastguard should get more pro-active, and penalise anyone who ignores their warnings and then gets into difficulties.
– – –Heavy and difficult ice conditions this season may compromise the Northwest Passage transit of some vessels, the coast guard added. – Ottawa Citizen report.

The Canadian Coast Guard rescued two passengers of a sinking sailboat who were trapped on an ice floe in Arctic waters early Wednesday morning. The incident took place in Bellot Strait. (CBC) Drama in the northwest passageSailing yacht gets into drift ice in the middle of the night, gets breached and sinks within minutes. The crew had to flee onto sea ice Pascal Schürmann on 29.08.2018 https://www.yacht.de/aktuell/panorama/drama-in-der-nordwestpassage/a118316.html

Yesterday night, the French-flagged yacht “Anahita”, an aluminum Ovni 345, sank in Ballot Strait of the Northwest Passage. The disaster occurred in Depot Bay, just east of Bellot Strait. According to initial information, the ship was trapped by drifting sea ice from which it could not escape.

The course of “Anahita” from Nuuk on the coast of Greenland went via Baffin Bay to Pond Inlet and on to the entrance of Bellot Strait…

Tony Heller, AKA Steve Goddard, has put together a 10 minute video exposing the Censorship against those who disagree with the rampant climate alarmism of the left wing establishment. The signatories to the latest clampdown on free speech are listed for posterity below the break.

Talkshop readers may remember a damning report by UBS about the billions of public money lost in the ETS carbon trading system. It calculated that if the money had been invested in modernising the European power generation fleet, CO2 could have been cut by 40% (and generate a huge number of high quality jobs). EU emissions rose 1.8% last year.

Despite all the recent turmoil over the UK steel industry and meetings in Brussels today, the reality is that the European Union has actually been subsidising the Chinese steel industry for years, in payments hidden amongst its efforts to combat Climate Change.

Using complex methods of carbon credits and carbon offsets, the EU devised rules on climate change ended up paying Chinese steel manufacturers billions to upgrade their steel mills and other energy intensive industry.

According to the analysis company, European Insights, almost €1.5 billion was paid to over 90 steel plants in China with the purpose of modernising them to consume less energy, and making the plants more efficient. Taken with the downturn in Chinese trade and the need for them to reduce world market prices to sell their product, the output of these mills has flooded onto the European market making steel products artificially cheap and endangering thousands of jobs in the UK. One plant alone, Anshan Iron and Steel, received a payment of €150 million to help pay for the installation of up to date equipment and replace the old inefficient Communist era machinery.

An ambitious attempt to extort vast sums of money from the oil industry, by using the US legal system to bypass normal democratic political process on the pretext of supposed climate problems, has drawn an expensive blank in court.
H/T The GWPF.

San Francisco (AP) — A U.S. judge who held a hearing about climate change that received widespread attention ruled Monday that Congress and the president were best suited to address the contribution of fossil fuels to global warming, throwing out lawsuits that sought to hold big oil companies liable for the Earth’s changing environment.

Borrowing Hollywood titles like ‘a clear and present danger’ isn’t going to overcome the fact that colourful predictions made about the climate by modellers and climate alarmists in general have failed to materialise. BBC – take note.

Republican senators asked federal investigators to look into whether or not several National Science Foundation (NSF) grants broke federal law, including funding projects lawmakers sought to “influence political and social debate” on global warming.

Science Magazine had fun taking the mickey out of this GOP Rep, but failed to uncover some seriously erroneous statements by a supposed “climate scientist” at the U.S. House of Representatives Science, Space and Technology Committee earlier this week.

This is their account (my bold):

The Earth is not warming. The White Cliffs of Dover are tumbling into the sea and causing sea levels to rise. Global warming is helping grow the Antarctic ice sheet.

Those are some of the skeptical assertions echoed by Republicans on the U.S. House of Representatives Science, Space and Technology Committee yesterday. The lawmakers at times embraced research that questions mainstream climate science during a hearing on how technology can be used to address global warming.

A leading climate scientist testifying before the panel spent much of the two hours correcting misstatements.

All this rests on the notion that humans can somehow tune the climate to their liking – whatever that may be – which of course has never been shown to be true. Are court cases and ‘rule books’ just the latest attempts to impose the will of one group in society, over everyone else? As this report says: ‘But such court battles are long, and often fail’. And ‘long’ often means expensive.

After climate talks in Bonn, many criticize outcomes as weak. Increasingly, concerned citizens see legal action as a path for climate action — a thousand climate lawsuits are currently active around the world, reports DW.com.

As climate negotiators return home after a two-week “intersessional” climate change conference in Bonn, Germany, their homework is only half finished. The COP24 annual climate conference, scheduled for December in Katowice, Poland, is supposed to decide a “rule book” for implementing the Paris Agreement.

But with so much at stake, there’s not nearly enough action, environmental activists say.

When is a ban not a ban? The Telegraph quotes the SNP’s own website which currently states: “The Scottish Government has put in place a ban on fracking in Scotland – meaning fracking cannot and will not take place in Scotland.” Seems clear enough from the renewables-mad SNP – but read on…

The Scottish Government’s claim in court that it had not banned fracking has been described as ‘beyond humiliating’; as two petrochemical companies argued that ministers did establish an ‘unlawful’ ban, reports the Daily Telegraph.

A lawyer for Ineos, which runs the giant Grangemouth refinery complex, said that ministers had created a policy through public statements that would prevent a fracking industry from developing in Scotland.

Who needs secrecy when public bodies are making important decisions that directly affect people – except for things like personal data, national security etc.? Censorship arouses suspicion, so showing evidence does matter.

This week EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt banned the use of “secret science” in EPA regulatory decision making. The Washington Post immediately cried foul, of course, by arguing that this would mean that important evidence would be ignored.

I argue, on the contrary, that it is very important that only evidence that is confirmed by the scientific method should ever be used.

Once again the high cost of so-called ‘green’ policies turns out to be politically embarrassing, and attempts to hide the true facts seem to have made things much worse.

As Ontarians head to the polls in June, voters have to make sense of two competing versions of their province’s bottom line: The Auditor-General’s and the Kathleen Wynne government’s, reports Toronto’s Globe and Mail.

Matthew McClearn investigates how creative accounting in hydro revenue made their math so different.

I was trained as an engineer and then did a degree in the History and philosophy of science.

I know how to calculate forces, I understand thermodynamics and radiative theory and I don’t ignore data inimical to any hypothesis.

After thirty years of monitoring and appraising the data, the global warming hypothesis and working out what really causes climatic change I’ve concluded that it ain’t CO2. The real causes of climatic change at the planetary scale are the enormous forces transferring energy between solar system bodies.

Jupiter and Saturn between them hold over 85% of the angular momentum of the system. Venus has, within an order of magnitude, the same gravitational force on the Earth-Moon system as Jupiter. The two of them have shaped the orbit of our Moon, whose tidal forces have a profound effect on the overturning circulation of Earth’s oceans, which contain 1000 times more heat than the atmosphere of which CO2 comprises 0.04%.